Author's announcement that the MySQL Bible, for beginner and intermediate MySQL DBA's, is available. The book is suitable for those completely new to databases, or those that are familiar with another RDBMS (such as Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server) and want to learn how MySQL works.

About six months ago, the question of storing images in a database came up. This is one of my favorite topics, and has many database-agnostic parts.Personally, I think "tell me about storing images in a database" is actually a great interview question, because you will be able to see the difference between someone who has just memorized "what's right" versus someone who is really thinking. It also helps you see how someone will communicate -- if they just say "NEVER do it, it's as bad as crossing the streams!" then they are a type of person that gives you a short answer, without much explanation, and without many nuances. (That may be what you are looking for, but usually you want someone who gives reasons for why they strongly feel one way or another).Consider the following cases:

Pythian DBA's have daily reports for each monitored database and some of the components are using charts to visualize the data. I'm a big fan of charts myself (when applied appropriately) and want to show how you can generate simple charts directly from the database. You'd be very surprised how easy it can be done from *any* database without installing any additional software or configuring something special.This method is not limited to Oracle by any means -- use it with MySQL, SQL Server or any other database as well as without a database -- yes, visualize your sar data now!In this example, we will plot a pie diagram with Oracle tablespaces. This would be very handy when you are starting to analyze the space allocation for a database. Here is the end result of the report for my Grid Control repository test database: